Display Connections

Description

Usage

Arguments

logical: if true all connections, including closed ones
and the standard ones are displayed. If false only open user-created
connections are included.

what

integer: a row number of the table given by
showConnections.

con

a connection.

Details

stdin(), stdout() and stderr() are standard
connections corresponding to input, output and error on the console
respectively (and not necessarily to file streams). They are text-mode
connections of class "terminal" which cannot be opened or
closed, and are read-only, write-only and write-only respectively.
The stdout() and stderr() connections can be
re-directed by sink (and in some circumstances the
output from stdout() can be split: see the help page).

The encoding for stdin() when redirected can
be set by the command-line flag --encoding.

nullfile() returns filename of the null device ("/dev/null"
on Unix, "nul:" on Windows).

showConnections returns a matrix of information. If a
connection object has been lost or forgotten, getConnection
will take a row number from the table and return a connection object
for that connection, which can be used to close the connection,
for example. However, if there is no R level object referring to the
connection it will be closed automatically at the next garbage
collection (except for gzcon connections).

closeAllConnections closes (and destroys) all user
connections, restoring all sink diversions as it does
so.

isatty returns true if the connection is one of the class
"terminal" connections and it is apparently connected to a
terminal, otherwise false. This may not be reliable in embedded
applications, including GUI consoles.

Value

stdin(), stdout() and stderr() return connection
objects.

showConnections returns a character matrix of information with
a row for each connection, by default only for open non-standard connections.

getConnection returns a connection object, or NULL.

Note

stdin() refers to the ‘console’ and not to the C-level
‘stdin’ of the process. The distinction matters in GUI consoles
(which may not have an active ‘stdin’, and if they do it may not
be connected to console input), and also in embedded applications.
If you want access to the C-level file stream ‘stdin’, use
file("stdin").

When R is reading a script from a file, the file is the
‘console’: this is traditional usage to allow in-line data (see
‘An Introduction to R’ for an example).